


Just Keep Swimming

by foolscapper



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Trippy stuff, ummmmm that's about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6952936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolscapper/pseuds/foolscapper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming —</p><p>Left foot, kick. Right foot, kick. Breathe in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Keep Swimming

**Author's Note:**

> AUTHOR NOTE: It’s a quick fill for an ohsam.livejournal.com prompt! The prompt was ‘Just keep swimming’. Which is now the title. A-yep.

_Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming —_  
  
Left foot, kick. Right foot, kick. Breathe in. Cough out. Muscles aching, lungs twisting, the inside of his nose is raw and burning with salty water; tastes like he’s trying to cleanse the bacteria from an infected tooth. He’s an inky figure battling black waves, and he can see the lights of the pier, but he has no faith that Dean will ever be able to see where the fae creature had flicked him. If he gets there on time. If he even realizes Sam was cast out into the ocean at midnight, weighed down heavy by a hunter’s thick jacket and jeans that feel like they weight a ton.   
  
Sam’s never been very lucky. Dean might just turn and rush away to the next place Sam could be. Because if he’s not at the pier, then where is he, right? Surely not in the starting waves of the fucking Pacific Ocean.  
  
He gasps a strangled sound, the muscle in one leg corded so intensely that he goes under a few times. How long as he been trying to get back? Is he cursed? Can’t ever reach the shore? How long has he been watching it, how long, as the lights bobbed far beyond his sight?  
  
 _— swimming, swimming —_  
  
For some reason, he’s got a Pixar movie quote stuck in his head after about an hour.  
  
In Dean’s annoying, sing-song voice.  
  
 _What do we do, Sammy? We swiiiiiim._  
  
“Sh-shut up, Dean, you quoted that for th-three weeks straight…”  
  
He tries to float, he does, but it seems like the moment he goes still and holds the air in his lungs, he starts drifting all over again. Despite how much he wants to sink from the neck down, his head still keeps burning through thoughts. Finding Nemo came out in 2003. Jess made him watch it on their third date, because she was an art major and she was infatuated with Disney. He ended up watching it on some washed out television in Denver, Colorado, when Sam still had shaggy bangs and had to pretend seeing the movie a second time wasn’t secretly lancing daggers through his heart to drain out the reminder.   
  
But Dean, he just kept quoting Dory, like, a month straight. Totally misspoke Sam’s name every chance he got, all of course girl names, because that’s Dean for you — Susan, Sally, Sandra. And for every pissy face Sam made, on the inside, it made the pressure on his chest a little more bearable. That was 2005. He was just a kid back then, really. 2005.   
  
He sinks back under the water, but he swears when he resurfaces he sees Dean’s silhouette. Sometimes, anyway. Is he getting any closer? He opens his mouth to call out, but he just rasps, swallows his voice down and is forced to inhale by his own betraying body. He thinks he hears _Dean’s_ voice, but maybe it’s just in his head, because everything seems too pitch black now for him to be conscious or alive or whatever. Surely he’d see the stars in the sky. Or the flicker of lights on a water-damaged wooden dock. Dean’s teeny tiny voice is probably a trick of the monster of the week. But at least nothing’s choking him today. It’s 2016, and if he doesn’t try to kick again, it’ll be the second year listed on his tombstone. Next to Mom and Dad, maybe. Cremated, of course, once Dean confirms the bloated, weird body is actually Sam and not… the monster of the week…  
  
 _“Hey Sam, you know what you gotta do when life gets you down?”_  
  
Just keep swimming?  
  
Well, he sinks. Like a fucking _rock_. 

* * *

He wakes up sliding his hands, and the first thing he notices is that he’s coughing water into his own eyes. The second thing is that he’s coughing water into Dean’s eyes, too. He sort of expects Dean to pull away and whine about it, but he just smooths back Sam’s hair and rolls him like a rumpled rug to expel the rest of the black, oozing sea.   
  
“Whr… Dearh…”  
  
“I don’t speak Klingon, Sam,” Dean’s voice crackles with sweet relief, rubbing circles in Sam’s back. Sam’s eyelids feel swollen. He’s too tired to open them, but he tries for another drag of air. The wooden pier under his hands feels curled and soft like carpet. There’s glass that plucks a drop of blood from his palm. He breathes in and it smells like a can of glade air freshener.   
  
Every word sticks to his innards, but he forces them out.  
  
“Tried t'swim… Saw you on the pier… running…”  
  
He feels Dean’s hand rub over his hair over once more, the motion a fully fledged sentence gone unspoken. He pats Sam down like he’s looking for something, and then the scent of burning herbs and leathery hide finally gets him to open his eyes, and he stares blearily at the remains of a hex bag up in smoke beside the broken picture frame of a family and their witch. Or a witch and her family. Whatever was left.  
  
Dean just asks, “What, Sam? What water? What do you mean, a pier? Sam.”  
  
Sam checks out. Black. Too tired to explain. He just groans instead. But he feels Dean carry his full weight on his back, out of the dead witch’s house, back towards their own home, waiting so patiently where cement waves meet the grassy shore. Sam flops bonelessly against his side of the Impala and sleeps the rest of the way back, dreaming about Californian spring breaks and Dean’s heavy palm checking his temperature every other hour, skin dry and jacket warm.   
  
He sinks, but he doesn’t start drowning.   
  
That’s not so bad.


End file.
